When I first saw the use of bit.ly, I didn’t click on it.  I thought for sure it must be some kind of spam, with a cryptic url like bit.ly/13ZWC.  But the article I was reading was pretty interesting, so I was pretty curious what was on the other side of that link.  Since the article was pretty well written, was clearly not trying to sell something, or pressure me to click on the link, I crossed my fingers and clicked it.  To my relief it was nothing, and just took me to additional information about the link.  

Then, pulled up my trusty google, and googled ‘bit.ly‘.  The second link was a nice article explaining the URL-shortening service, and it’s abilities.  I was impressed.  Not only that, but given what bit.ly does with the URLs that it shortens, it gave me reason to start using the service.

• They give a really cool feature that lets you search all the urls shortened in twitter.
• The info for each bitly URL is generally public, meaning I can gather info on any bitly url that I see (including my own) by including a + sign, e.g. http://bit.ly/13ZWC+
• They offer a nice API, to programmatically talk to bitly for creating small urls, getting conversion, and click through information, etc.

All in all, I’m really impressed, and will use this over tinyURL.

Rate This Article:

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...